The questions every VSO should be asking about any policy change are:
1) How will this affect the career of the proposer, given current political priorities?
2) Will the proposer be long gone by the time any major snags show up?
3) Will it be politically unacceptable to admit the mistakes, and so necessary that they be covered up?
Only afterwards should the technical details and reasoning be examined.
However, most VSOs are actually asking:
How will this affect
my career..?..etc
If you apply this logic, I believe a far higher percentage of decisions 'make sense'.
Also explains the Credit Crunch, etc
Trying to reason out the policy changes by efficiency, efficacy etc is, with all due respect, missing the point. There is a need to measure current VSOs against their previous decisions, though even this doesn't pick up point (3) above; and given the PM is a
PR man, there is more stuff being buried in Whitehall than Brookwood Cemetery.